R. Bakker - The Judging eye

Achamian thought of the innkeep's warning. "Stand aside for the Skin Eaters," he had said.

They strike you down but good.

"I have built a place," the High-King said.

It was strange, the way Achamian knew he dreamed, and the way he knew it not at all, so that he lived this moment as a true now, as something unthought, unguessed, unbreathed, as Seswatha, speaking with another man's selfsame spontaneity, every heartbeat counting out a unique existence, veined and clothed and clotted with urgent and indolent passion. It was strange, the way he paused at the forks of the moment and made ancient decisions…

How could it be? How could he feel all the ferment of a free soul? How could he live a life for the first time over and over?

Seswatha leaned over a small table set between glowering tripods. Snake-entwined wolves danced in a bronze rim around the lip of each, so that the light cast by their flames was fretted by struggling shadows. It made staring at the benjuka plate and its occult patterns of stone pieces difficult. Achamian suspected his old friend had done this deliberately. Benjuka, after all, with its infinite relationships and rule-changing rules, was a game of prolonged concentration.

And no man loathed losing more than Anasыrimbor Celmomas.

"A place," Achamian repeated.

"A refuge."

Seswatha frowned, bent his gaze up from the plate.

"What do you mean?"

"In case the war… goes wrong."

This was uncharacteristic. Not the worry, for indecision riddled Celmomas to the core, but the worry's expression. Back then, no one save the Nonmen of Ishterebinth understood the stakes of the war that embroiled them. Back then, "apocalypse" was a word with a different meaning.

Achamian nodded in Seswatha's slow and deliberate way. "You mean the No-God," he said with a small laugh-a laugh! Even for Seswatha, that name had been naught but a misgiving, more abstraction than catastrophe.

How did one relive such ancient ignorance?

Celmomas's long and leonine face lay blank, indifferent to the geography of pieces arranged between them. The totem braided into his beard-a palm-sized countenance of a wolf cast in gold-seemed to pant and loll in the uncertain light.

"What if this… this thing… is as mighty as the Quya say? What if we are too late?"

"We are not too late."

Silence fell upon them as in a tomb. There was something subterranean about all the ancillary chambers of the Annexes, but none more so, it seemed, than the Royal Suites. No matter how thick the decorative plaster, no matter how bright the paint or gorgeous the tapestries, the lintelled ceilings hung just as low, humming with the weight of oppressive stone.

"You, Seswatha," the High-King said, returning his gaze to the plate. "You are the only one. The only one I trust."

Achamian thought of his Queen, her buttocks against his hips, her calves hooked hot and hungry about his waist.

The High-King moved a stone, a move that Seswatha had not foreseen, and the rules changed in the most disastrous way possible. What had been opportunity found itself twisted inside out, stamped into something as closed and as occluded as the future.

Achamian was almost relieved…

"I have built a place… a refuge…" Anasыrimbor Celmomas said. "A place where my line can outlive me."

Ishuдl…

Sucking musty air, Achamian shot upright in bed. He grabbed his white maul, pressed his head to his knees. The Long-Braid Falls thundered beyond the timbered walls, a white background roar that seemed to give the blackness mass and momentum. "Ishuдl," he murmured. "A place…" He looked up to the heavens, as though peering through the obscurity of his room's low ceiling. "But where is it?"

Whining ears, sorting through the fibres of sound: laughter from the floor, breaking like a bubble in boiling pitch; shouts calling out the streets, daring and proclaiming.

"Where?"

The truth of men lay in their origins. He knew this as only a Mandate Schoolman could. Anasыrimbor Kellhus had not come to the Three Seas by accident. He had not found his half-brother waiting for him as Shriah of the Thousand Temples by accident. He had not conquered the known world by accident!

Achamian swung his feet from his blankets, sat on the edge of his straw-mattressed bed. The words from some ribald song floated up through the joists in the floor.

Her skin was rough as brick,

Her legs were made of rope.

Her gut was plenty thick,

And her teeth were soft as soap.

But her peach was cast in gold.

Aye! No! Aye!

T'were her peach that had me sold!

Waves of gagging laughter. A muffled voice raised to the Coffers. A ragged, ululating cheer, soaking through wood.

The Skin Eaters, singing before they shed blood.

For the longest time, Achamian sat motionless save for the slow saw of his breathing. It seemed he could see the spaces beneath, that he hung upon glass over close limb-jostled air. The Captain was absent, of course, as remote as his godlike authority required. But he could see Sarl, his ink-line eyes, age-scorched skin, and gum-glistening smile, see him using his rank to enforce the pretence that he was one of them. That was his problem, Sarl, his refusal to acknowledge his old man crooks, the flabby reservoirs of regret and bitterness that chambered every elderly heart.

And then there were the men, the Skin Eaters proper as opposed to their mad handlers, spared the convolutions of long life, lost in the thoughtless fellowship of lust and brute desire that made the young young, flaunting the willingness to fuck or to kill under the guise of whim, when in truth it all came down to the paring eyes of the others. Recognition.

He could see all of it through night and floors.

And the Wizard realized, with the curious fate-affirming euphoria of those who discover themselves guiltless. He would burn a hundred. He would burn a thousand.

However many fools it took to find Ishuдl.

The company stomped to the foot of the escarpments, in the chill of the following morning, a long bleary-eyed train bent beneath packs and leading mules, and began climbing out of the squalid precincts of Marrow. The switchback trail was nothing short of treacherous, smeared as it was in donkey shit. But it seemed appropriate, somehow, that spit and toil were required to leave the wretched town. It made palpable the limits they were scaling, the fact that they had turned their backs on the New Empire's outermost station, the very fringe of civilization, both wicked and illumined.

To leave Marrow was to pass out of history, out of memory… to enter a world as disordered as Incariol's soul. Yes, Achamian thought, willing his old and bandy limbs step by puffing step. It was proper that he should climb.

All passages into dread should exact some chastising toll.

Mimara has learned much about the nature of patience and watching.

And even more about the nature of Men.

She realizes quite quickly that Marrow is no place for the likes of her. She understands her fine-boned beauty, knows in intimate detail the way it hooks, burrlike, the woollen gaze of men. She would, she knows, be endlessly accosted, until some clever pimp realized she had no protection. She would be drugged, or set upon by numbers greater than she could handle. She would be raped and beaten. Someone would comment on her uncanny resemblance to the Holy Empress on an uncut silver kellic, and she would be trussed in cheap-dyed linens, foil, and candy jewels. For miles around, every scalper with a copper would walk away with some piece of her.

She knows this would happen… In her marrow, you might say.

Her slavery moves through her, not so much a crowd of flinching years as an overlapping of inner shadows. It is always there-always here. The whips and fists and violation, a clamour shot through with memories of love for her sisters, some weaker, some stronger, pity for the torment in the eyes of some, those who would weep, "Just a child…" They used her, all of them used her, but somehow the bottom of the jar never dried. Somehow a last sip remained, enough to moisten her lips, to dry her eyes.